The Weekly Standard reserves the right to use your email for internal use only. Occasionally,
we may send you special offers or communications from carefully selected advertisers we believe may be of benefit to our subscribers.
Click the box to be included in these third party offers. We respect your privacy and will never rent or sell your email.

Please include me in third party offers.

One of the most typical reactions of French commentators to the arrest of Dominique Strauss-Kahn in New York has been a kind of knee jerk disparagement of the American criminal justice system – or the “atrocious” American criminal justice system, as one “expert” put it on the French news channel BFM. The first images of a hand-cuffed Strauss-Kahn being led out of a Harlem police station served as a lightening rod for such sentiments, with news reports vaguely suggesting that photographing or filming a restrained suspect is somehow or another incompatible with the presumption of innocence.

I don’t particularly like the American justice system, but in my opinion there’s at least one respect in which they have something to teach us: namely, the fact that they treat the immigrant maid and the head of the IMF perfectly equally. We have a lesson to learn from that: …on how to treat the victim [of a sexual assault], on how to treat the powerful and the poor, who should be treated on an equal basis, which is not the case in France. You know very well, if this episode had occurred in France, it would not have turned out [the same way]…

I place the last words in brackets since, as is his custom when interviewing her, Bourdin did not let Ms. Le Pen complete her sentence.

Le Pen’s father Jean-Marie had a more spontaneous, less elaborate reaction to Strauss-Kahn’s arrest. “It’s always good news to see a scoundrel in handcuffs,” he told journalists outside a Parisian restaurant.

John Rosenthal writes on European politics and transatlantic security issues. You can follow his work on Facebook here or at www.trans-int.com.